I  think it's probably worth mentioning that me and Aidan have set up a group blog where we will be posting things to do with our media opening from now on, and you can find it here.

Cool.

Inspiration for practical

The first film opening that has inspired me is The Science of Sleep from 2006, directed by Michel Gondry.



I think that the opening to this film is good as it immediately gives you an idea of the main premise. The main character Stephane is represented as likeable,as well as highly imaginative. This is shown through many ways, for instance, the camera constanstly follows him as he ducks and dives and runs around the room, as if he is important and we should care about what he has to say. It also helps as he is shown as the presenter of his own imaginary tv show. The setting, a room entirely furnished in egg boxes and cardboard, demonstrates his creative side as he has created the entire scene in his head. The music used is supposedly played by Stephane himself, which again highlights his creative side. The audience is positioned to like Stephane from the off, through the way that he acts and talks, as well as because of his creative passion.

How does a film's budget affect its production practices?

The budget of a film can heavily affect the production practices. More money available means that the company can afford to hire more famous actors and use better locations. There is also a vast difference in what marketing is available to the makers of the film.

A good example of a high budget film is The Dark Knight. The Dark Knight had a budget of around $185 million and therefore had enough money do almost whateever it wanted.

As you can see just by watching by the trailer, almost all of the actors featured are easily recognisable and are famous in their own right, not just for appearing in this film. To get actors of this calibre, Christian Bale, Michael Caine, Heath Ledger, Aaron Eckhart and Gary Oldman to star in the film, the production company would have to pay large amounts of money to them as their salary.

In terms of technology, a high budget gives the makers of The Dark Knight a good advantage, as they can use cutting-edge technology to film the movie. For instance, the director Nolan used and IMAX camera to film certain sequences, such as The Joker's first appearance in the film. This would have cost a lot more to do, on top of all the other cameras being used. However, the end quality of the film would be much higher than a film with a smaller budget.

Location-wise, the makers could pretty much film whereever they wanted around the globe. For instance, they used large sections of Chicago to film Gotham City, as well as filming in England and Hong Kong for one section of the film.

The marketing for The Dark Knight was unusual in the way that as well as the usual marketing such as posters and trailers, they also used a large amount of viral marketing to get people involved with the film's release. Warner Bros. reportedly spent over $100 million on marketing, which most other films would not get at all.

At the other end of the spectrum there are very low budgets films such as This Is England, which had a meager budget of £1,500,000. This affected the production practices heavily in comparison.

The actors in This Is England; Thomas Turgoose, Joe Gilgun, Andrew Shim, Vicky McClure, Stephen Graham, are relatively unknown and you probably would have not heard of them before seeing the film, unless you had previously seen similar films with them in, though like the actors, the films were probably not that well known either.

The technology available to the makers was very limited due to the budget that could be used. They only had the standard equipment available and had to film on location as sets would have cost too much to make.

The makers were only backed by FilmFour and Yorkshire Films, and so didn't have the budget to go al laround the world, not that the plot called for it anyway. Much of the film was shot in predominately residential areas of Nottingham, including St Ann's, Lenton and The Meadows, with one section featuring abandoned houses at the former airbase RAF Newton, just outside of Bingham, Nottinghamshire.

The film also didn't have much in the way of marketing, apart from posters and afore-mentioned trailer.

An example of a film with a medium sized budget is Hot Fuzz, which had a budget of $8 million.

The cast of this film are pretty much all famous, though some might not be known outside of the UK, though here they are familiar faces on British film and television. The actors in Hot Fuzz include Simon Pegg, Nick Frost, Jim Broadbent, Timothy Dalton, Paddy Considine, Edward Woodward and Billie Whitelaw.

The makers had enough budget to make several explosions in the film, as well as use technology to remove a church from the background of the town they were filming in. Apart from this, there was not much notable technology used to make the film.

For the location, the town of Stow-on-the-Wold was considered, amongst others, but after being turned away, the company settled upon Wells, the director, Edgar Wright's hometown. The budget meant that they couldn't build an entire town from scratch but they could take over a town to film in for a while.

For marketing, the first two teaser trailers were released on 16 October 2006. Wright, Pegg, and Frost maintained several video blogs which were released at various times throughout the production of the film,  Wright and Frost held a panel at the 2006 Comic-Con convention in San Diego, California to promote Hot Fuzz, which included preliminary footage and a question and answer session.  The two returned to the convention again in 2007 to promote the US DVD release. Advanced screenings of the film took place on 14 February 2007 in the UK and the world premiere was on 16 February 2007. The premiere included escorts from motorcycle police officers and the use of blue carpet instead of the traditional red carpet. They also made sponsoship deals with Volkswagen.

Overall, it is clear that the budget of a film can make a substantial difference to the way that the film is produced, from who is in it, to where and how it is filmed, and what methods can be used to advertise it.

Awesome Film Openings

I've been watching a load of film openings and these are ones that I think are great.

Pulp Fiction


I think that this is a good opening because the characters are interesting and the plot just starts with no introduction, leaving you guessing as to what is going on. I also like the part where the scene goes into the titles because it's funny.


Watchmen
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cLGDys0gpr8
I can't embed this clip but I think it's good because the whole scene is mysterious yet very action packed. I also like the style in which it is filmed.

X-Men 2


This opening is action-packed and just a great start to one of the best comic book movies ever.

Burn After Reading
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6WncMIahz18
I like this opening because it starts off like a serious action thriller but really it's more of a black comedy.

Overall I would have liked to have put some more clips in of my favourite films, such as The Darjeeling Limited, directed by Wes Anderson because I love his style of filmmaking. However the clips weren't available. I hope to try and put some kind of hook into my opening so that people will want to watch it longer.

Our Magazine Prelim

Our second preliminary was about magazines. As you would expect, we therefore had to make a magazine on Adobe Photoshop.

I found the experience mostly easy, as I am quite experienced with Photoshop, but the only problems I did have were where I was expecting a tool or function to be somewhere in the program but it wasn't because the version of Photoshop I'm used to at home has more available. Basically, the main issue was that I found the school's version of Photoshop to be much simpler and basic than the version I have, which makes sense as some people are not experienced at all, but I jumped in at the deep end when I first learnt how to use Photoshop, and this time I found it hard to take that step backwards.

On our magazine we tried to follow the generic conventions to keep it looking as professional as we could. We made it so the masthead covered a small part of the main image as is the norm with many magazines. We also mentioned celebrities in our cover lines, as well as many real life human interest stories as that often appears on front covers. We also kept the colour scheme to three colours (excluding white), which were blue, green and black. The main image also filled up a large portion of the page.

The target audience was school students, and we tried to attract them with cover lines that would make them laugh, cry, be disgusted at, etc. Either way our main focus was to ensnare their interest and make them buy the magazine. Making it a pound will have helped too.

Our beautiful front cover and contents page

(warning: contains facial hair)

My First Preliminary Task

Yay this is my first blog

For our preliminary task, we had film a person walking into a room and then proceeding to engage in a conversation with another person. The shots that we needed to include were:

• 180 degree rule shot
• The person entering the room
• A shot of them coming through the door
• Walking across the room
• Them having a conversation with the other person

Editing wise, we used several features of iMovie to (possibly) enhance our work. For instance, at the beginnning we used a type of titles which looked as if it had been typed on an old computer. This made it look as if it was some form of serious sci-fi/action/drama-type text, i.e The X-Files. We used the 'flash' effect a couple times in order to add impact to the action at the time e.g. Aidan kicking a chair across the room and slamming his fists on the table while shouting "For the love of Zac Efron!" We also used several filters and paused frames to make Chris seem more sinister than he already looks.

In terms of sound, we only really used small section of music at the start to set the scene, but from then on we used only diegetic sound as I felt that any other music would make it impossible to make out the conversation, which would then only make all the actual dialogue completely pointless.

Overall I found that it was an enjoyable experience, as I thoroughly enjoy all the filming and editing that goes into making a short piece, no matter how unprofessional and weird ours may have been.